I like how, even when the whole point is to not have any terms or conditions, there are still disclaimers. "Only for lawful purposes," "no warranty," "we are not responsible."
Right? Why include that? The law automatically applies. Including it in the license is just redundant.
Had it simply read "You may use this site for any purpose." or "You may use this site." or "You may use this" or "This can be used." it would have the same level actual restriciton in that you obviously aren't allowed to use it to break the law regardless of what it actually says.
And, having typed all that, I realize that there is another restriction in that it presumes that there is a 'you' using it. Things that are not 'you' cannot use it given that it specifically lists 'you' in the referenced parties. "This can be used" would be more permissive.
That’s simple CYA, and also ensures you’ve not only done the illegal activity, you’ve defrauded the brokerage and breached your contract with them, and they get a weak KYC defense as well.
Similar to the “Al Capone” instructions from the IRS:
>Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
On the other hand, if you want to talk about these stickers all over Seattle saying you’re not allowed to conduct illegal activities on the premises…
For the majority of banks, they do not want people to conduct illegal activity via their bank. For the minority of banks which don’t mind it, nothing stops them from adding the clause anyways. A cartel bank probably cannot use the existence of the clause as a defense if they’re still allowing illegal activity.
If the purpose is to allow the bank to terminate accounts suspected of illegal activity, my assumption is they can already terminate for much less than that.
It’s not just that they don’t want it, it’s that they’re liable for it themselves if they should have known it was happening. Asking you adds one more small layer of “we discouraged illegal activity and we didn’t know about any”.
Bank 1 has the CYA clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
Bank 2 does not have the clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
In neither case does the clause prevent the illegal activity or make the bank any more or less aware of what customers are doing. They have to do KYC regardless of what the TOS says.
I'm curious if anyone has ever said yes to income from illegal activities. Moreover, I wonder if something like this would be protected under 5th amendment.
This is probably a meek attempt at demonstrating compliance with Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) laws and regulations. Lawyers will often suggest this sort of thing, because the only cost is a slight inconvenience to the client, and it might suggest 'good faith' in the case of a prosecution or enforcement action.
When it's in the contract, then it means that when you break the law you both break the law and the contract. SHould it be necessary? Perhaps not, but in some places that makes a meaningful difference.
Legal matters are almost never black and white. If someone does something illegal using my service, and some other 3rd party sues me as party to that illegal behavior, from a legal perspective having a clause like "no criminal behavior allowed" in there makes it easier for your lawyers to argue "my client clearly didn't intend to authorize/facilitate such behavior". This argument is of course made much stronger if it is paired with behavior, like banning (or attempting to ban) the criminal user as soon as the activity was identified.
But if you are paranoid you should speak with a lawyer in your jurisdiction.
In most places it doesn't make a difference to the outcome of the legal process what it does do is give you a quicker simpler off ramp from the legal process (which reduces costs) and may stop some idiots even trying to sue in the first place.
"Do not iron clothes while on body" should not be required to not be found liable, but it does change the question in court from providing discovery for safety consideration, how comprehensive is the manual, how... and the costs involved with that to "Did the customer use the device in a way that was it was clearly labelled to not be used? Did any part of the product packaging or instructions contradict this warning? ...Dismissed".
On top of that, I think my canister of Lysol wet wipes and many other bottles of cleaning chemicals says something like "it is against federal law to use this product for any purposes other than its intended use"
Like, yeah it's illegal to do illegal stuff with or without the label, but at least Lysol could say "we did tell him that he can't use it for that."
Interesting question. I wonder what the default (implied) T&C would be if nothing has been explicitly stated. For example, publishing a source code without an explicit license doesn't make it open source.
Encourage, probably not. Facilitate, possibly. That's why my bottle of Windex glass cleaner says "it's against federal law to use this product for anything other than its intended purpose."
In either case it's illegal for me to use it for bad purposes, but how much I can blame on Windex depends on how much they let me know that I shouldn't do bad stuff with their products.
Ask every account that has ever released information on drug use, lock picking, explosives manufacture, or "hacking" - they all say "for educational purposes only" for a damned good reason
This is the real salient point in this post in my opinion;
It unintentionally demonstrates the limits of individual agency to avoid legal embroilments
That is to say: it doesn’t really matter what this person puts on their website because there is a judge and a sheriff somewhere that can force you to do something that would violate the things you wrote down because the things you wrote are subordinate to jurisdictional law (which is invoked as you point out)
It’s actually pretty poetic when you think about it because the page effectively says nothing because it doesn’t have content that the license applies to
If it’s a art piece intended to show something about licensure all it does is demonstrate the degree to which licensure is predicated on jurisdiction
Preventing computer-based cheating in competitive chess is a big deal (and I assume go also), because spectators tend not to want to watch two computers playing against each other.
Who is "we"? Given the EU is the single largest foreign market openly accessible to the USA and all that money y’all invested into your pension ETFs needs constant growth to avoid shrinking, and the EU is your best bet on that… I’d recommend not ignoring us :-)
It depends, not everything requires explicit consent. Where it doesn’t, it’s sufficient if the terms are clear, understandable, and transparent. The last criterion means that the terms must be prominently advertised in the locations where they apply.
Remember when people started using WTFPL because it "sounded good", only to later find out it left them and their users legally liable? This is that but for websites.
I know this is mostly parody, but I'm curious if anyone has good starter templates for something that covers the general stuff and doesn't require a lawyer to customize
This does not read like it was written by a professional. Non-professionals writing licenses and T&Cs cause problems because no organization, for profit or not, wants to be dragged into court to get a "common sense" definition of a word or comma defined, at their expense.
I've heard of large organizations reaching out to places who use amateur T&Cs and licenses, saying "if we give you $X, can you dual license this as MIT, Apache, BSD, or hell anything standard?".
> Access is not conditioned on approval
Is this obvious enough legalese to not waste tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees if you get sued?
Note before you reply: I will not argue with you about how obvious it is. If you are actually a lawyer then it'd be interesting to hear your guidance, which I very much understand is not legal advice. If you're not a lawyer then I'm not.
I practice law in California. I've written terms of service that many, many people here on HN will have agreed to. I read this line and didn't know what it meant, or what it intended to mean.
That said:
> If you are actually a lawyer then it'd be interesting to hear your guidance, which I very much understand is not legal advice. If you're not a lawyer then I'm not.
There's no good way to validate lawyerdom on public social media like HN. And while the average lawyer probably remembers enough from law school or bar exams to know slightly more about Web terms of service and legal drafting than the average person, there's nothing to stop non-lawyers from reading up and learning. Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog is a great, public source covering cases on ToS and other issues, for example.
The Bar monopolizes representation within legal institutions. Don't cede the law itself to lawyers.
I'm guessing it means that your use of the website is not contingent on you accepting (approving of) the terms presented. But there are plenty of other ways it could be reasonably interpreted. For instance, your access of the website is not contingent on the website operator approving said access.
> I'm guessing it means that your use of the website is not contingent on you accepting
I don't think it says that at all. Because "accepting" is the right word for this interpretation, as you point out. "Approval" is a different thing altogether. You can accept something without approving of it -- that's the main message in the Serenity Prayer and hundreds of self-help books that try to reframe that message, maybe to help it sink in, maybe just to grift a little.
If it was literally spelled out as "Your access is not conditioned on your approval" that could almost be taken as a threat -- you will access this whether you want to or not.
> For instance, your access of the website is not contingent on the website operator approving said access.
To me, this is clearly what it says. "(Your) access is not conditioned on (our) approval."
But, of course, since you read it differently, I have to agree that perhaps it's not as clear as I thought.
However...
Contracts and agreements, if ambiguous, are always interpreted in a light most favorable to the party who didn't draft them.
So, absolute worst case (for the website owner), if we combine your reading and mine, it reads "Your access is not conditioned on either your approval of these terms, or our approval of you."
Sounds like a smart strategy then. Use an amateur license. People who just want to do stuff know they have your blessing. Corporations will stay away or pay up, not because you made them, but of their own volition. Everyone is happy.
Of course even better is to simply have no explicit license, especially for something like code. Normal people can assume they can do whatever they'd like (basically, public domain). Lawyers will assume they cannot. The only thing stopping someone is their own belief in their self restrictions. i.e. you can use the thing if and only if you don't believe in my authority on the matter.
No explicit license is not basically public domain. In most jurisdictions it means the default is full copyright, so permission is less clear, not more. The practical effect is usually to increase ambiguity rather than grant freedom.
That's the point: it's a rejection of the premise that you need these sorts of terms. You treat the law as the farce it has turned itself into. If people reject the farce, they can use it. If they support the farce, they can't (well, they can, but they think they can't). In a sense, an anarchist's viral FOSS license.
I'm not. In saying people who want to share their work should just do so. If your goal is to not have terms, don't have terms. Don't lend credibility to the idea that you need to by default.
Consider the war on drugs. Recreational marijuana is still highly illegal everywhere in the US, but there's businesses selling it that operate in plain view. How did we get there? Because people continued to point out how the law delegitimized itself until enforcement has started to become impossible.
"Often one generation values things much more than others. Boomers and their wristwatches. One generation is like 'only from my cold dead hands,' the others 'what would I even need this for?!' What are examples of things the youngest generation did away with?"
If OP were a checklist, the answer would have checked every point.
Southwest Airlines got sued by some other company over, IIRC, color schemes. Southwest's CEO (Herb Kelleher) made an offer to the other CEO: They skip the lawyers and settle it with an arm-wrestling contest. The other CEO agreed.
Eventually, they wound up selling tickets to the match, and donated the proceeds to charity.
I like how, even when the whole point is to not have any terms or conditions, there are still disclaimers. "Only for lawful purposes," "no warranty," "we are not responsible."
Those are still terms and conditions!
Right? Why include that? The law automatically applies. Including it in the license is just redundant.
Had it simply read "You may use this site for any purpose." or "You may use this site." or "You may use this" or "This can be used." it would have the same level actual restriciton in that you obviously aren't allowed to use it to break the law regardless of what it actually says.
And, having typed all that, I realize that there is another restriction in that it presumes that there is a 'you' using it. Things that are not 'you' cannot use it given that it specifically lists 'you' in the referenced parties. "This can be used" would be more permissive.
I recently had to confirm to a brokerage that I won’t be using the money I’m withdrawing for any illegal activities.
A sure sign of a legal team or possibly an entire legal system having lost the plot. Hopefully only the former.
That’s simple CYA, and also ensures you’ve not only done the illegal activity, you’ve defrauded the brokerage and breached your contract with them, and they get a weak KYC defense as well.
Similar to the “Al Capone” instructions from the IRS:
>Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
On the other hand, if you want to talk about these stickers all over Seattle saying you’re not allowed to conduct illegal activities on the premises…
I still don’t understand the CYA though.
For the majority of banks, they do not want people to conduct illegal activity via their bank. For the minority of banks which don’t mind it, nothing stops them from adding the clause anyways. A cartel bank probably cannot use the existence of the clause as a defense if they’re still allowing illegal activity.
If the purpose is to allow the bank to terminate accounts suspected of illegal activity, my assumption is they can already terminate for much less than that.
It’s not just that they don’t want it, it’s that they’re liable for it themselves if they should have known it was happening. Asking you adds one more small layer of “we discouraged illegal activity and we didn’t know about any”.
Maybe I am just slow.
Bank 1 has the CYA clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
Bank 2 does not have the clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
In neither case does the clause prevent the illegal activity or make the bank any more or less aware of what customers are doing. They have to do KYC regardless of what the TOS says.
Having a clear clause to point to when terminating the account seems useful.
I'm curious if anyone has ever said yes to income from illegal activities. Moreover, I wonder if something like this would be protected under 5th amendment.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it is not protected under the 5th amendment.
For Good, not Evil, unless you're IBM™
https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38...
This is probably a meek attempt at demonstrating compliance with Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) laws and regulations. Lawyers will often suggest this sort of thing, because the only cost is a slight inconvenience to the client, and it might suggest 'good faith' in the case of a prosecution or enforcement action.
So, the entire legal system.
> I won’t be using the money I’m withdrawing for any illegal activities.
My guess is that this is so they can ban any drug dealers from their site without consequence. "They violated our terms of service your honour!"
When it's in the contract, then it means that when you break the law you both break the law and the contract. SHould it be necessary? Perhaps not, but in some places that makes a meaningful difference.
Now I'm paranoid. To your knowledge, which places does it make a difference, and what difference does it make?
Legal matters are almost never black and white. If someone does something illegal using my service, and some other 3rd party sues me as party to that illegal behavior, from a legal perspective having a clause like "no criminal behavior allowed" in there makes it easier for your lawyers to argue "my client clearly didn't intend to authorize/facilitate such behavior". This argument is of course made much stronger if it is paired with behavior, like banning (or attempting to ban) the criminal user as soon as the activity was identified.
But if you are paranoid you should speak with a lawyer in your jurisdiction.
In most places it doesn't make a difference to the outcome of the legal process what it does do is give you a quicker simpler off ramp from the legal process (which reduces costs) and may stop some idiots even trying to sue in the first place.
"Do not iron clothes while on body" should not be required to not be found liable, but it does change the question in court from providing discovery for safety consideration, how comprehensive is the manual, how... and the costs involved with that to "Did the customer use the device in a way that was it was clearly labelled to not be used? Did any part of the product packaging or instructions contradict this warning? ...Dismissed".
On top of that, I think my canister of Lysol wet wipes and many other bottles of cleaning chemicals says something like "it is against federal law to use this product for any purposes other than its intended use"
Like, yeah it's illegal to do illegal stuff with or without the label, but at least Lysol could say "we did tell him that he can't use it for that."
> Right? Why include that? The law automatically applies. Including it in the license is just redundant.
Perhaps not. The law, as automatically applied, often include implied warranties.
It's almost like the most effective way to publish without T&Cs is to just, you know, omit the section and publish what you want without T&Cs.
Interesting question. I wonder what the default (implied) T&C would be if nothing has been explicitly stated. For example, publishing a source code without an explicit license doesn't make it open source.
I guess it’d be whatever the other party’s lawyer can persuade the judge into.
> Right? Why include that? The law automatically applies.
Because the law applies - by that I mean if you don't put a disclaimer in then the law takes the view that you do provide a warranty, etc.
Does it take the view that I encourage/facilitate illegal use of my product unless I state otherwise in the T&C?
Encourage, probably not. Facilitate, possibly. That's why my bottle of Windex glass cleaner says "it's against federal law to use this product for anything other than its intended purpose."
In either case it's illegal for me to use it for bad purposes, but how much I can blame on Windex depends on how much they let me know that I shouldn't do bad stuff with their products.
Ask every account that has ever released information on drug use, lock picking, explosives manufacture, or "hacking" - they all say "for educational purposes only" for a damned good reason
Should have gone for the WTFPL
If anyone knows that rules exist to be broken, it's Jorji. Glory to Cobrastan.
"NoTermsNoConditions"... Proceeds to list 9 terms and conditions.
It should be called bare-termsandconditions or minimal-termsandconditions.
This is the real salient point in this post in my opinion;
It unintentionally demonstrates the limits of individual agency to avoid legal embroilments
That is to say: it doesn’t really matter what this person puts on their website because there is a judge and a sheriff somewhere that can force you to do something that would violate the things you wrote down because the things you wrote are subordinate to jurisdictional law (which is invoked as you point out)
It’s actually pretty poetic when you think about it because the page effectively says nothing because it doesn’t have content that the license applies to
If it’s a art piece intended to show something about licensure all it does is demonstrate the degree to which licensure is predicated on jurisdiction
Right. The cake is a lie.
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I wonder how many one-sentence prompts have made it to the HN front page at this point.
"Alternative Terms" was the giveaway.
Why? For what?
I don’t know, but it’s kind of boring to speculate since computers easily beat us at chess and go.
Preventing computer-based cheating in competitive chess is a big deal (and I assume go also), because spectators tend not to want to watch two computers playing against each other.
Why do you say that?
> By accessing or using this site, you acknowledge and accept the following terms.
I’m pretty sure this is already questionable in the EU.
yeah - thats why we just ignore the EU
Who is "we"? Given the EU is the single largest foreign market openly accessible to the USA and all that money y’all invested into your pension ETFs needs constant growth to avoid shrinking, and the EU is your best bet on that… I’d recommend not ignoring us :-)
---
It depends, not everything requires explicit consent. Where it doesn’t, it’s sufficient if the terms are clear, understandable, and transparent. The last criterion means that the terms must be prominently advertised in the locations where they apply.
Prior art: https://github.com/sorat0mo/wtfpl/blob/master/WTFPL2.txt
Comedically, this doesn't load from my IP address in the Russian Federation. (HN does.)
> 4. Nothing here is guaranteed, including availability, correctness, continuity, or fitness for any purpose.
There you go.
Yes that was one of the nine terms the site didn't have.
unintended condition: cloudflare
p.s. quick fix is "stop being lazy and move the single html off cloudflare"
I’m not lazy, I’m just tired of the fucking AI crawlers trashing my bandwidth.
A similar one I made a while back, inspired by South Park's disclaimer before each episode: https://github.com/jmrossy/south-park-license
Remember when people started using WTFPL because it "sounded good", only to later find out it left them and their users legally liable? This is that but for websites.
No alarms, no surprises
My mind when to the same thing. Great song.
Schrödingers terms and conditions
Read carefully if you are of a feline persuasion
I know this is mostly parody, but I'm curious if anyone has good starter templates for something that covers the general stuff and doesn't require a lawyer to customize
I like the [Basecamp policies](https://github.com/basecamp/policies). Explicitly open source, limited legalese.
Thanks! Basecamp's and Github's were a few of the open source ones I came across
Not sure how this is supposed to be useful, but I had a good laugh.
The URL basically nulls the license agreement.
> Access is not conditioned on approval.
The Zen Koan of T&C's.
goes without saying
that this site definitely
does not, legally
amazing how such a simple website lags to scroll on my phone
use this if you want a corporation to use your content & IP to make money, while offering nothing to you (or the community) in return.
Hope this slop doesn’t get anyone into trouble.
Not sure “last updated=never” works, but I don’t make terms and conditions websites.use at your own risk
> 8. You are responsible for what you do, what you build, and what follows from either.
As far as I'm concerned this doesn't mean anything legally unless I missed something. Aren't you already responsible for what you do or build anyways?
Or is this somehow meant to mean something else but worded so badly it can't be understood.
Is that useful for anything?
This does not read like it was written by a professional. Non-professionals writing licenses and T&Cs cause problems because no organization, for profit or not, wants to be dragged into court to get a "common sense" definition of a word or comma defined, at their expense.
I've heard of large organizations reaching out to places who use amateur T&Cs and licenses, saying "if we give you $X, can you dual license this as MIT, Apache, BSD, or hell anything standard?".
> Access is not conditioned on approval
Is this obvious enough legalese to not waste tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees if you get sued?
Note before you reply: I will not argue with you about how obvious it is. If you are actually a lawyer then it'd be interesting to hear your guidance, which I very much understand is not legal advice. If you're not a lawyer then I'm not.
> > Access is not conditioned on approval
I practice law in California. I've written terms of service that many, many people here on HN will have agreed to. I read this line and didn't know what it meant, or what it intended to mean.
That said:
> If you are actually a lawyer then it'd be interesting to hear your guidance, which I very much understand is not legal advice. If you're not a lawyer then I'm not.
There's no good way to validate lawyerdom on public social media like HN. And while the average lawyer probably remembers enough from law school or bar exams to know slightly more about Web terms of service and legal drafting than the average person, there's nothing to stop non-lawyers from reading up and learning. Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog is a great, public source covering cases on ToS and other issues, for example.
The Bar monopolizes representation within legal institutions. Don't cede the law itself to lawyers.
You can be competent without being a lawyer, sure. But if you see the other replies to my comment, you see why I would use this as a filter.
The dumbest person can be right, but as a lawyer, your guess is much better.
I don't cede the law. It's just that if I find this unclear, then J Random Hn commenter's opinion wouldn't reduce my risk.
I won't be acting based on your opinion either, of course, but the quality of your reply is clearly in a different class from the other two.
It's common for non-lawyers to write terms and conditions, and other contracts.
> I will not argue with you about how obvious it is.
Good. Don't. Because it is exceedingly plain, if concise, English.
I'm guessing it means that your use of the website is not contingent on you accepting (approving of) the terms presented. But there are plenty of other ways it could be reasonably interpreted. For instance, your access of the website is not contingent on the website operator approving said access.
> I'm guessing it means that your use of the website is not contingent on you accepting
I don't think it says that at all. Because "accepting" is the right word for this interpretation, as you point out. "Approval" is a different thing altogether. You can accept something without approving of it -- that's the main message in the Serenity Prayer and hundreds of self-help books that try to reframe that message, maybe to help it sink in, maybe just to grift a little.
If it was literally spelled out as "Your access is not conditioned on your approval" that could almost be taken as a threat -- you will access this whether you want to or not.
> For instance, your access of the website is not contingent on the website operator approving said access.
To me, this is clearly what it says. "(Your) access is not conditioned on (our) approval."
But, of course, since you read it differently, I have to agree that perhaps it's not as clear as I thought.
However...
Contracts and agreements, if ambiguous, are always interpreted in a light most favorable to the party who didn't draft them.
So, absolute worst case (for the website owner), if we combine your reading and mine, it reads "Your access is not conditioned on either your approval of these terms, or our approval of you."
Somehow, I think the author is OK with this.
This is exactly the kind of comment I politely asked people not to make.
Did you see the actual lawyer saying they don't know what it means?
A statement that "If you're not a lawyer then I'm not." is blunt, not particularly polite or not.
In any case, (a) it's not a request, and (b) if you truly want to control the narrative, then perhaps you should just do that from your own blog.
Sounds like a smart strategy then. Use an amateur license. People who just want to do stuff know they have your blessing. Corporations will stay away or pay up, not because you made them, but of their own volition. Everyone is happy.
Of course even better is to simply have no explicit license, especially for something like code. Normal people can assume they can do whatever they'd like (basically, public domain). Lawyers will assume they cannot. The only thing stopping someone is their own belief in their self restrictions. i.e. you can use the thing if and only if you don't believe in my authority on the matter.
No explicit license is not basically public domain. In most jurisdictions it means the default is full copyright, so permission is less clear, not more. The practical effect is usually to increase ambiguity rather than grant freedom.
That's the point: it's a rejection of the premise that you need these sorts of terms. You treat the law as the farce it has turned itself into. If people reject the farce, they can use it. If they support the farce, they can't (well, they can, but they think they can't). In a sense, an anarchist's viral FOSS license.
You are essentially saying that shoplifting is legal because as a civilian you are unlikely to get caught.
This is a terrible take. All it takes is a litigious jerk, and you could get bankrupt. And that jerk will be legally in the right.
I'm not. In saying people who want to share their work should just do so. If your goal is to not have terms, don't have terms. Don't lend credibility to the idea that you need to by default.
Consider the war on drugs. Recreational marijuana is still highly illegal everywhere in the US, but there's businesses selling it that operate in plain view. How did we get there? Because people continued to point out how the law delegitimized itself until enforcement has started to become impossible.
You are essentially saying that walking is safe because as a civilian you are unlikely to get robbed.
This is a terrible take. All it takes is an angry mugger, and you could get killed.
Walking is not illegal.
That's why your analogy doesn't work.
Just today I asked an LLM:
"Often one generation values things much more than others. Boomers and their wristwatches. One generation is like 'only from my cold dead hands,' the others 'what would I even need this for?!' What are examples of things the youngest generation did away with?"
If OP were a checklist, the answer would have checked every point.
No further update.
i do wonder if the world would be a better place if instead of lawyers we had cage matches
Southwest Airlines got sued by some other company over, IIRC, color schemes. Southwest's CEO (Herb Kelleher) made an offer to the other CEO: They skip the lawyers and settle it with an arm-wrestling contest. The other CEO agreed.
Eventually, they wound up selling tickets to the match, and donated the proceeds to charity.
Now that's a civilized way to conduct a lawsuit.
hugged to death
Last updated: never lol
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brilliant !